Lion ate ALL my Mail

This is NOT good. Granted I keep tens of thousands of messages in dozens of folders, but they're all important to me in one way or another.
With the Mail conversion that took place as part of my Lion install (conversion by itself took an hour or two), I was left with a message that said my Mail index was screwed, but that it would be recreated after the next restart. Not so! Or at least there's no evidence that anything is happening. When I launch Mail, no windows or messages appear... just the bar at the top. If I right-click the icon in the dock, it says "application not responding".
I know that "application not responding" doesn't always mean that nothing is happening, so I'll probably wait overnight to see if anything has developed by morning.
Anyway, I neeed to prepare for the worst. How do I back out of this new Mail app altogether, so that I can restore my email from Time Machine?
...Charles

Just a quick update to anyone who may still be following this tonight.
Timothy, I really think that your problem is totally different from mine, so if deivy's suggestion for your issue doesn't work for you, you might get more responses by opening a new topic.
deivy... yes I know there is Help documentation if I could access it. The new Mail is dead to me, including Help. Thanks for copying over the relevant sections. I tried that without success.
I wish there was something... anything... displayed when I launch the new mail. All I get is the standard bar of menus at the top.. none of which will open. And no windows at all. You'd think that if it couldn't find mail, it would act like it was starting from scratch... waiting for me to set everything up.
Unless there are any further suggestions tonight, here's my plan...
1. Quit being impatient. At midnight, I'll shut down all apps, do a restart, and only launch the new Mail. I'll repeat deivy's instructions again if necessary to eliminate those files. Then I'll wait to see if it has done anything by morning.
2. Failing that, I'll try Rodney's suggestion on the Time Machine restore, but if the new Mail is totally unresponsive now, I'm sceptical about it reactivating and attempting the conversion again. We'll see.
3. Download and install Lion again. Since I haven't done an OS install from a download before, I assume that the installer isn't still sitting on my Mac somewhere? I'll have to do it from the Mac store again?
More to report tomorrow.
...Charles

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